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Comment by konschubert | Hacker News Reader

Yea. I am selling a pretty honest product, nothing fishy about it. Not even naughty. Just an eink display for google calendar.

My Google Merchant account got banned immediately and I have no idea why.

For now, I have decided to not play this game and will look for marketing avenues outside google.

EDIT: In case you want to play a game of guess-what-got-him-banned, this is the product page: https://shop.invisible-computers.com/products/invisible-cale...

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You’re probably better off shipping free hardware to appropriate bloggers, etc rather than burning cash at the altar of Google.

yes. That's what I will probably try.

I'm partial to https://www.sevarg.net myself; it's not me but he may be interested.

> In case you want to play a game of guess-what-got-him-banned

My stab-in-the-dark would be using the word "Google," probably by overly-simple heuristics trying to prevent tech support scams. You know, those flashing banner ads that say "Immediate action required on your Google account! Click here to fix!"

Could be related to your site saying "Note: Due to high demand, current orders may take two weeks to ship. ".

Thats pretty long. What do you have set in your merchant center shipping settings? See https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6069284?hl=en

That note is just there since last week because there was a peak in orders and I am struggling to keep up. It wasn't there when they paused my merchant account.

1) Mentioning Google and Google account many times

2) something innocent (using Tor, using blocklisted VPN, being associated with a banned google account)

3) something you're not telling us (violating some google policy, billing address in sanctioned country, using stolen cc, I know you didn't but you asked to guess!)

My guess is that it is probably 1). Somebody in their anti-spam team read "Google Calendar", saw my display and thought "Nah, that's no google calendar" :D

But maybe it was something else. It's of course possible I violated some kind of policy. But they're not sending me any debug messages :D

This looks like a very nice product and it matches exactly something that I've been wanting and thinking about. So I tried to order one (using PayPal), but it doesn't seem like you're shipping to Norway. Are you planning to open up for shipments to more countries any time soon?

Norway requires CE, as far as I know. I don't have that certification yet, it's quite expensive, about 7000 Euro.

It pains me that I cannot sell within Europe, I can see the sales I am losing.

Hopefully I can bootstrap those funds before the holiday season :D

EDIT: I created a google form. When it is available in Europe, I will notify anyone who leaves their email: https://forms.gle/96sGBWFsxgAomG3Q9

I don't think you would need to pay so much. In most cases i.e. not health, not children etc you can even self certify: https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/product-requirements/l...

I want one so bad. Only thing is, I'd like to run my own software on it - do you support modding?

yes and no.

It's easy if you just want to display your own content:

https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image...

or, if you want to share your app with others, there is:

https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/ma...

It's hard if you want to run your own embedded code. I just haven't written the documentation for it and you would need your own UART flasher board.

Wow, very clever, just display an image! Does the image server really have to be on the Internet? Can I just enter a locally-resolvable hostname or IP address?

Has to be online since it is proxied via an online backend which does the actual black-and-white conversion etc.

I have some ideas for letting users point the device directly to a local URL, but I don't want to commit to any promises on that front.

You could try using something like https://ngrok.com, that's what I sometimes use for testing.

Hm, I see. I’m pretty sure I can figure out how to serve a greyscale image. I suggest making that proxy explicit in your docs. You suggest using HTTPS and an obscure URL to keep our data “secret” but then you’re literally processing our content and could be doing anything with it.

That's a valid point. Image data is never stored, only hashes. But it passes though the server and I don't like that either.

It's not quite greyscale, it has to be in a specific binary black-and-white representation, but definitely do-able if documented. Or I could publish a little python library.

Just thinking out loud here.

Yeah don’t mean to diminish the project, it’s very cool! I’m sure you already have a lot of work into it.

This thing is almost exactly what I was looking for less than a week ago. It’s actually even simpler and more clever than I imagined. For me less is more. Just serve an image at a URL. EZPZ.

If you want to make it hackable I suggest docs first because everyone is going to want to use their own preferred language. Maintaining a library is just more work and image processing libraries are already a dime a dozen.

That's a good point about documentation-first. Sometimes a little reference code can say more than 1000 words, though :)

> I just haven't written the documentation for it and you would need your own UART flasher board.

That would not be an issue. However, I'm based in Germany as well... do you have some sort of newsletter?

No newsletter, but I just created a google form I you want to get notified if/when it is available in Europe: https://forms.gle/96sGBWFsxgAomG3Q9

Awesome work, and awesome product. I want to plug a friend's project, 15 years ago, Google's Radish - https://developers.google.com/gdata/articles/radish - Which looks pretty primitive and bulky by comparison but had excellent engineering and set of tradeoffs at the time.

What's it's power draw? Can it be run from a battery for a few weeks? That's one of the big advantages of e-paper over a tablet screen (the other major one being viewing angles), and one with a built in battery (so it can report status on the screen itself) would be great.

It doesn't have an internal battery and I don't know the exact power draw.

But since it's in deep sleep most of the time, I don't think it draws a lot.

Why mention Google calendar? Why not also display Outlook calendars or whatever?

Seems like you could, and Google is probably wondering why you are trying to use their name in your product?

Lots of red flags for this commodity product, which is issue three.

Commodity product? Are there other e-ink calendars/generic displays? I was looking for one the other day and came up with nothing.

That’s a really nice-looking product, and inspiring to those of us who’d like to create and sell our own creations.

Thanks man.

Oh wow I was just looking for something like this the other day. The actual calendaring feature isn't as useful to me as a live weather report and daily forecast (next 24 hour weather) plus tide chart. Can this be customized/hacked?

You can point it to an image URL and it will refresh whenever that image changes.

https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image...

So as long as you can dynamically serve an image of the content you want to see, you can connect the display to it.

Or you can even build an app that others can use (this is experimental still):

https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/ma...

Do you ship to Europe? And it says it's open - do you have docs for that? If so I'll buy one immediately. It's beautiful and surprisingly affordable for the size.

In terms of openness, there is this:

https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image...

and this:

https://github.com/Invisible-Computers/image-gallery/blob/ma...

I also want to make the esp32 controller itself more hackable in future, but I don't want to promise anything because that's quite a lot of work for me.

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I'll ship within Europe as soon as I have bootstrapped the 7000 Euro necessary for CE certification.

Unfortunately, my dear home country of Germany isn't a very friendly place for small hardware boostrappers. :P

EDIT: I created a google form. When it is available in Europe, I will notify anyone who leaves their email: https://forms.gle/96sGBWFsxgAomG3Q9

Thanks! Anywhere I can get updates for Europe certification? Rare case I'd subscribe to a newsletter if you mentioned it in there.

No, I don't have one... I really need to get one going. In the meantime, there is only instagram: http://instagram.com/invisiblecomputers/

EDIT:

I decided to crate a google form if you want to get notified:

https://forms.gle/96sGBWFsxgAomG3Q9

Thanks!

Are you aware of the CE Self Certification process?

https://cemarking.net/ce-marking-knowledgebase/ce-self-certi...

This still requires you do do EMC testing, including Wifi and Bluetooth band testing.

Like, you need to rent out a lab for a day or so. And probably want to pay an expert to write the docs for you.

Even though it contains a fully certified esp32-WROOM WIFI module, CE requires me to bring my own lab reports.

In that case I would suggest you sell it as a kit.

I think that's a but of a legal gray area... not quite sure.

PS:

Good to see you on HN still after all those years, cool to see you interested in my little project. :)

Just in case you have something on the top of your mind... I am kind of looking to build a bit of a hardware - boostrapper support network for myself, do you know anyone I should reach out to? Just other people working in the space... I am not too sure about hardware incubators but I would also be open to ideas there..

I get parts shipped to me all the time from the US to EU via Mouser, I can't imagine it being a problem.

It doesn't seem as though GP has a problem sourcing parts, it's more of a networking issue (networking in the real-world sense).

I wasn't talking about sourcing parts, OP was talking about certification for sales in the EU which I think can be sidestepped selling as a kit of disparate electronic parts. I can receive Mouser shipments from the US to Germany, for example, as long as they're not development boards (which require a declaration of usage) or certain batteries.

I can't imagine why OP would be unable to ship those parts as a kit if they so chose.

I don't see that either. There is nothing legally grey about shipping kits. There is about shipping a finished product and marking it as a kit.

Yes, there is HN user https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Kliment who is super knowledgeable about this stuff, and in Germany.

I clicked through to see what got you banned and I gotta be honest, this product looks pretty good! Just wanted to note that.

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